What Happened in Vegas

Last week, from March 30 to April 4, Las Vegas hosted ICASSP, the International Conference on Acoustic Speech and Signal Processing. This is one of the largest conferences of the IEEE Signal Processing Society which is held every year in different locations around the world (next year ICASSP 2009 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan). More than 2000 participants, more than 1300 academic papers presented at the conference, 300 of which dedicated to speech and language technologies.

Topics related to speech recognition, spoken language understanding, and dialog technologies are always very hot and represent the majority of the presentations in the speech and language area. That is a clear indication that the interest of academic and industrial research in the human-machine interaction using speech recognition has not diminished, but has been growing steadily during the past years.

So, what is hot in speech and language technology research this year? Certainly voice search and its applications is one of the areas that attracted a lot of attention, with a special session entirely dedicated to the topic. However, besides basic research on speech recognition and language modeling, there were also several interesting presentations on the most recent advances on dialog learning, emotion detection, speech translation, audio mining, spoken information retrieval, and spoken language understanding.

The Show & Tell session was one among the most interesting events; it attracted hundreds of people for a whole afternoon. SpeechCycle presented a demo of our “third generation” customer care systems, including the advanced tools that participate into what we call “the cycle”, such as authoring, reporting, learning and optimization of dialog, speech accuracy tuning, annotation, SLM training, and online behavior modification, based on our latest QuickTouch product. Our demo gave to the many people that stopped by our booth a clear sense of the advancements that a company like SpeechCycle has brought to the commercial world. We at SpeechCycle have a good tradition of technological innovation, and we cherish our strong links with the worldwide research community in the speech and language areas. Contrary to the popular say, this time we hope that what happened in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas.

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SpeechCycle’s papers presented at scientific conventions and workshops:

· Evanini, K., Suendermann, D., Pieraccini, R., Call Classification for Automated Troubleshooting on Large Corpora, ASRU 2007, Kyoto, Japan, December 9-13, 2007

· Albalate, A., Dimitrov, D., Pieraccini, R, Unsupervised Categorisation Approaches for Technical Support Automated Agents, Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, August 27-31, 2007.   

· Acomb, K., Bloom, J., Dayanidhi, K., Hunter, P., Krogh, P., Levin, E., Pieraccini, R., Technical Support Dialog Systems, Issues, Problems, and Solutions, HLT 2007 Workshop on “Bridging the Gap, Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology,” Rochester, NY, April. 26, 2007.

· Levin, E., Pieraccini, R., Value-Based Optimal Decision for Dialog Systems, Proc. of IEEE/ACL 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies (SLT 06), Aruba, Dec. 10-13, 2006.